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Holiday Dinner with the Harkonnens-- The various fall/winter holidays are almost upon us. Because we have participants from all over the globe on ConceptArt.Org, let's forget the usual earthly holidays we think of at this time of year. In lieu of doing a Thanksgiving round or a Christmas round, let's imagine a holiday on a fictional alien planet. Let's spend the holidays with the House of Harkonnen, who live on the planet Giedi Prime in Frank Herbert's Dune Universe. Giedi Prime is known to be largely over industrialized, polluted, and denatured... but not entirely so. Any native creature that still survives on Giedi Prime must be a fairly robust species, and rare, to serve at a holiday dinner of nobility.

Your task this round is to design a new alien creature, indigenous to the planet Giedi Prime, which the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and his family would eat at a traditional holiday meal. If you are not familiar with the Dune Universe, you should try a little research on Wikipedia. The Harkonnens are the really evil villains of the book (although one could argue there are different degrees of bad guys all over the Dune books...)... The Harkonnens are really decadent, really sadistic, really terrible. I think their character should be reflected both in what they choose to eat and how they prepare it.

This will be a two part challenge. I want to see two illustrations with your entry. The first should be your new alien creature design as it would appear in life, in the wild, before it is hunted down and killed (or perhaps, as they are farmed by the Harkonnen clan.) The second illustration should show the 'serving suggestion.' Depict this creature as it would be prepared and served by the Harkonnens' chefs as the main course for a holiday dinner. Think about this for a moment. The Harkonnens are nobility, but they're also entirely perverse. Really try to have fun with this one. You should give equal thought to both the design of the living alien creature as well as how it would be served for dinner. If you find yourself short of time and still want to enter, remember that this is still Creature of the Week first. Focus on the living creature.

Because of the Thanksgiving weekend coming up, as well as the two part illustration, I am going to give you a little more than a week to complete this. Instead of this being due Tuesday December 1st, I'll make the deadline Sunday December 6th.

note: The deadline won't be EXACTLY after a week...it can last up to 24 hours or more, i am human and have to work also, you know
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Incidentally, I realize we usually have a rule against giving a creature props, accessories, etc. In the case of the second illustration of the cooked and served creature, of course you're allowed to include whatever culinary pots, plates, utensils, garnishes, side dishes, etc you think is appropriate to present the Harkonnen Holiday Main Course!

desert orchid wip 1

first sketche of the desert orchid.
This time i want to try to have an more fixed concept before starting to work more seriously on the drawings....think sometimes i got a problem to decide what i want to do exactly and loose lots of time changing my concept around... so here it goes :
The desert orchid is extremly rare and valuable.The orchid-like looking mouth of the creature sticks out of the sand and is supposed to have beautyful colors and different shapes in each exemplar.An magnificent sight in the arid desert.
the body is very ugly but the creature is harmless, sad looking and even got some inteligence.They have an complex way to communicate with each other and grow near the spice.Their exact role in the complex ecosystem of the desert planet is yet to be studied....
the harconnen catch them when they encounter one and rip the orchid off to decorate their palace. they keep the agonizing creature until the day of the feast and open the soft-body shells to eat the creature alive.
This harkonnen are really evil and twisted so they gain pleasure in the suffering of the poor creature.The guts of the creature are fried in boiling oil and condimented with the dried orchid-petals which are rich in spice.
its a bit like a fondue...

btw : inever read the books - big error of mine - but i saw the movie several times-

oh darn it - i just went looking for gedii-prime and yeah its an industrial planet and stuff - got to change my concept ---arrgl
the various planets are one of the more confusing part of the movie if you didn´t read the books ---
i think maybe i can keep my critter and just change his story- the one in the left down corner looks a bit aquatic - so it could be some kind of toxic-mud-lurking thingy sticking his orchid-snout out of the pools of foul water around the harconnens factorys.......
what do you think??? ----- help highly appreciated !!!

Last edited by Vaghauk; November 25th, 2009 at 04:24 PM.
Reason: dune-noob

Life on earth is expensive, but it includes a free trip around the sun every year.

nebezial - looking forward to where you take that image. Looks juicy even now.

jspangler - Yes, a nice big feast! I'd like to see the 500 foot table they lay that turkey on. My only crit is that the beast is still pretty whale-ish.

Vaghauk - Since there's a few extra days on this it may be a good opportunity to research and draw before you commit to one idea. I never read the books either, but any author that develops a whole universe is rare so it's good to acquaint ourselves with their work. I learned a lot about Merlin and Arthurian legends on that last round. Nice sketches though, no matter what their planet of origin.

I'm trying to be a blank slate on this right now, gonna do some reading, some watching and some drawing and see where it leads. For those of you who didn't know, there was a Dune movie planned by Alejandro Jodorowsky (he did Holy Mountain, El Topo, Santa Sangre - all weird amazing films) there were designs by Moebius, Giger, and Salvador Dali was even supposed to act in it - would've been a whole different look, very surreal and far more colorful and decadent than Lynch's version.

The Following User Says Thank You to Steve Somers For This Useful Post:

Steve Somers - You think I should go with the Titantagon over the "meatballs"? I'm finding myself thinking more and more about the big bastard anyway so I think I will stick with him.

The concept is that he has a large, tentacled tongue that secrets a viscous fluid which it drags through the toxic seas gathering all sorts of delicious waste, bacteria, algae, mutated fish, etc, etc before slurping it all back into its cavernous maw. Occasionally they lumber onto land and do the same thing through forests, cities, whatever is around. They are not particular.

But he is still too "Whaleish" ... I'm going to keep developing. Thanks for the feedback.

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
--- Frank Herbert, Dune - Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear

[QUOTE=jspangler;2528937]Steve Somers - You think I should go with the Titantagon over the "meatballs"? QUOTE]

The meatballs are cool too, but the big guy seems like more of a challenge to work out when you show how they eat him, like imagine some whale size fillets cut out of that bad boy? Or if they eat the blubber like Eskimos do - Maybe a Harkonnen in the background doing some scimshaw on a tooth? Maybe a last supper style picture with this massive meat pile arcing over the whole table - the mind races.

One last update and then Im OOT for the holiday (so no COW work till next week). I am working to move the Titantagon away from too much of a whale and make him his own "thing". I'm liking this version...

First look of pencils. My art has been pretty lacking of inspiration lately. So I'm forcing myself to do this COW in the hopes it can get me back on track.

My idea is two-fold for this creature. My thoughts are that the creature has human-like qualities and features as well as a very tasty tip of the tail cherry like ball.

I picture the Harkonnens as people that would delight in the torturing of the creature due to the human-like characteristics as well as the fact that when in pain the creature sounds like a crying human baby.

Once tired of the torture the Harkonnens will cut the tip of the tail off to serve as an orderve, leaving the creature to slowly bleed to death and die. During holidays hundreds of these creatures will be killed to serve the Harkonnens and there guests.

steve somers : yeah - guess i´m going to research and scribble a bit more on this - its really a fun and tasty topic.... somehow the orchid idea doesn´t fit geidi - prime...but it could be what the harconnens eat on their holidays when they have picnic on desertplanet.... back with some more sketches soon.

Life on earth is expensive, but it includes a free trip around the sun every year.

okay - i did some homework and found something interesting.The Slig -a creature mix of slug and pig that was emperor shaddam corrinos IV favorite meal. The slig was genetically engeneered - so i imagine the harconnen could engeneer something similar for them to hunt and eat..... lets see where this leads ...

Life on earth is expensive, but it includes a free trip around the sun every year.